AdWords Quality Score Coming to Content Network

About time, too

[netmeg]

Got email today from the Inside Adwords Blog that over the next few days they were going to be incorporating landing page quality scores and tweaking their algorithms throughout the Content Network (similar to what they did for Search this summer)

Me, I'm all for it from both sides (AdWords and AdSense)

[mainspot]

Is it time to clear all of our competitive ads filter?

[netchicken1]

Beautiful :)

Today is the highest income I have ever had for a Saturday, with similar clicks as in the past.

I wonder how much of this is to the new system and how much putting the MFA sites into my Competitive Ad Filter helped.

[mzanzig]

Is it time to clear all of our competitive ads filter?

I just had a look at my main site with the Preview Tool. Disappointing. How can that company with the 39,000+ domains still be in the advertiser pool? They are purely MFA (made-for-ads) and do not add to the visitors experience. If we had a "block-by-advertiser" feature, this would be the first to go in.

So - apparently things have improved, but I would not cheer too quickly. There are still advertisers around that deserve a place in your filter list. :-)

[chrisv1963]

"Is it time to clear all of our competitive ads filter?"

Certainly not! Why would you want to do that?
The MFA sites are still there. They are making a mess of our websites and they belong in the comeptitive ads filter.

Actually, it would be a good idea for Google to use our competitive ad filters in the algo to calculate the quality score. The more competitive ad filters a domain appears in, the lower the quality score and the higher the cost per click. Some of those MFA domains must be in hundreds of competitive ad filters!

[fearlessrick]

Glad to see those of you doing well. As usual, I see little to no change over the past few days. In fact, my pool of advertisers seems to have diminished to a relative few. I think more than anything else, my niche sucks.

Planning alternate sites and not wasting time with old friends who "want to make some extra cash." (personal inside joke)

Enjoy the evening.

[europeforvisitors]

The free market determines what is a crappy site. Keep your hands off Google. It's not your business to evaluate and judge our website.

Why not? Media buyers are looking for audience quality, not just keyword relevance. Plus, AdSense is Google's network, so evaluating the quality of partner content (whether manually or by automated means) is Google's business.

Still, this has nothing to do with the topic of quality scores for advertisers' landing pages. Let's not confuse apples with oranges, or advertisers with publishers.

[mzanzig]

So, the Quality Score has hit (embraced?) the content network, and so far I see slightly positive results. Slightly higher EPC, moderately improved revenue, definitely better ad quality and less MFAs.

However, I really wonder why/how some of the biggest offenders still can bypass this Quality Score? For example, that site with 39,000+ domains still seems to get through. I would have expected all the sites (running on a single IP address BTW) would be assigned the lowest quality rank by default - they just exist for arbitrage, and I would be very happy to see them go. This would also free up roughly 20 slots in my filter list.

[netmeg]

However, I really wonder why/how some of the biggest offenders still can bypass this Quality Score? For example, that site with 39,000+ domains still seems to get through.

I suspect that things are going to continue to be tweaked and refined as time goes on. In fact, I'd be extremely surprised had they caught everything in the first go-round.

[shortbus1662]

my cpm has now been in the tank since I posted that it was way up.

Worst couple of days in a long time.